News Archive

News

Okay, so we're a little early with the seasonal greetings, but I'm sure a lot of you have your hands full in the days leading up to the 24th/25th. The only Christmas-themed game I could think of was this promo game from Melbourne House - it's not exactly mind-blowing. Hopefully we can undercover something better for next year!A special, if delayed, thank you to Aran (iamaran) for converting all of Dorothy Millard's solutions and starting the long process of uploading them. That's quite a lot of work. Of course, also thanks to Dorothy for allowing us to reuse her solutions here.

The games just keep rolling in. Honestly, I have no clue where they come from(*), but presumably they're breeding at night somewhere in large numbers. This weeks update features a plethora of Atari titles. A particular thank you to Juan for supplying those.(*Well I do, actually, it has something to do with all those editors and resourceful users out there!)

A while ago we began a series of starting guides. I'm pleased to announce that the series continues with a crash course for the TRS-80, courtesy of Dale Dobson. Personally I've had my share of headaches over TRS emulation, so this is a welcome addition indeed.

Finally, Fredrik who joined the team recently has been placed as Head of C64. Once again welcome to our knowledgeable Swedish adventurer!

Yet another week with a plethora of titles. This time around we're seeing a lot of TI-99/4A and Atari titles (the latter meaning that our Atari section wasn't as complete as I though - whoops!). More to come. A particular thank you to Ermanno Alekin for his assistance with our Italian section.

New text adventures for the classic platforms are few and far between, so Wade Clarke's Leadlight, a fresh game of "survival horror" for the Apple II is a welcome addition. The game will play straight in your browser or via your favourite emulator. Neat! Give it a go and let us know what you think.

The observant user might have noticed that the site was offline for several hours at the beginning of last week. The observant user might also have noticed that the screenshot browser is working again after being buggy for several months, and that all screenshots now load instantly, instead of doing a 30-second timeout first. All this is thanks to the effort of Fredrik Ramsberg. What a difference!

Actually, we thought Fredrik was so clever that we made him join our ranks :) He's a veteran in the adventure community. I'm not sure yet what his exact role will be, but he's already been busy updating. He also quite a capable coder and will help develop the siter further, along with Dave and Mr Creosote.

I continue to be impressed by the number of platforms that text adventures have reached - including some fairly unlikely ones. We already have the Atari 2600 and Mattel Aquarius listed, and now the NES has been added, too. Neat!

Recently we started a project with starting guides. I know that a lot of you switch a lot between various platforms when playing text adventures, and sometimes you might like to try out a game on a machine which you have absolutely no experience with. What to do? Well, your sleepless nights are over (or maybe they're just starting?). We've added guides to get you up and running on the C64, BBC, Dragon, Sharp MZ and Amstrad CPC. If you feel like writing a guide for any of the other platforms, we'd love to hear from you!

As you probably know, one of our key goals here at CASA is to uncover games that are largely forgotten and overlooked elsewhere. Therefore I’m very pleased to announce that our Tatung Einstein and Coleco Adam game catalogues are fairly complete. (Erm… at least I think so! Feel free to prove me wrong.)

The two platforms stand at a decent 26 and 56 games, respectively. The Einstein’s listing is largely comprised of Infocom titles, but a number of original titles have snuck their way in there, too. And there are a very respectable number of Adam-exclusive titles. So dive in and give the rest of us a nudge if you start playing something worthwhile! Thanks to Mario Castro of Tatung Einstein Reborn and Joe Blenkle of ADAM Family Computer System for assistance.

Our good friends over at World of Spectrum, particularly the excellent Gerard Sweeney, have helped us immensely by offering data of their entire catalogue of Spectrum adventures. The import was completed the other day, and today's update is (and will probably remain) the largest in the site's history. No less than 800+ updates and a whopping 1,200+ entirely new games ensure that there's plenty of challenges for all for the foreseeable future! All games have screenshots, company and author info, but genres and synopsises are missing, so please help whereever you can.

We have spent a great deal of time trying to make sure that the import data would match up with our own data (no mean feat as I very much doubt any of us has an overview of every game in our system at this point). Still, some devious variances in spe1lling and punctuation have most likely made certain that nasty double entries are now present in the CASA database. We'll try to round up the culprits - if you spot any, please let us know.

With this latest update, the site's game count has tripled since the re-launch, and we now feature games in no less than 24 languages. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Close to a week has passed since the last update and another bumper crop of games has been added to the site - our thanks to all contributors.

That aside, I would like to draw everyone's attention to a part of the site that is currently underused, the game rating system. The greater the number of games rated the better the game recommendation system becomes, therefore it would be helpful if more people rated games. For those wishing to help please try and rate at least ten games over the coming months. (Remember that "5" is average and if you come across an absolutely dire game you can give it a "0" [zero] rating.)

I'd like to welcome Alex to the editorial team. Alex has been one of our main contributors lately and he is now formally Head of Platform on the MSX, but he appears to be pretty fond of the C64 as well.

In other news, we should have a review of the recently released Get Lamp documentary up pretty soon.

Once again the editing team grows - I'd like to welcome an old regular, Aran (iamaran), to our group of diligent admins. Virtual drinks are on the house :) Along with Dave, Aran will take a special interest in the Beeb/Electron department.

A special thanks must also go to Alex for extensive C64 updates and solutions.

We're still getting a lot of community submissions, which is all adding to the database. This time we've been filling out a lot of Spanish adventures.

Please continue sending us as much as you know about an adventure - even the title alone will allow one of the admins or regulars to go scurrying around the Internet and fill out the extra information!

Thanks to a couple of hard-labouring users, there has been a large inflow of updates these last couple of weeks. We still have a bit to go with the backlog, but by all means, keep the updates and files coming!

Et voila! With the game count now standing at a very decent 2001, it seemed like a suitable spot to stop for a moment and send a few kind thoughts to Kubrick and Clarke :)

One of the fun things about being part of a site like this is that you encounter all sorts of computers which a lot of us have hardly heard of, let alone owned. A few days ago I was reminded of the Coleco Adam which turns out to have a very decent selection of games exclusive to that platform. Similarly I dare anyone to tell about their extensive experiences with the Tatung Einstein, Memotech MTX or the - to some - blatantly overlooked Grundy NewBrain.The variety of the platforms - and the amount of money and energy wasted on all the "dead ends" is overwhelming...

If you know of any machines not yet registered here at CASA, please drop a line.

The other day I came across Dale Dobson's brilliant blog, Gaming After 40. Among other things, Dale muses about classic adventure games. Each week he covers an oldie (often a U.S. release) by giving it his verdict and then going through the game from A to Z while commenting on its merits and offering a historical perspective. It's as informative as it is engagingly written, and I can only give it my warmest recommendations.

My co-editors and you, our users, have been busy, so with this update we're closing in on the 2,000 game mark. Nice going, everyone!

With this update, we've added a large number of games to the Oric and Atari 400/800 sections (hopefully) making them (largely) complete(ish) (how's that for covering my back?).That's just the game entries of course - much information is missing. Feel free to update whereever you can.Major thanks to Mark Hardman for the use of data from his Gamebase, and to The Oric Site for data and images.

Users often bemoan the lack of good games to solve. With today's update there are now 665 unsolved games in the database. Yes, I did feel a certain juvenile urge to add another title in order to reach that magic number, but the thought of fire, brimstone and religious pressure groups made me reconsider.At any rate, whether they're actually good remains to be seen, but now there are games aplenty to dig your teeth into. Bon appetit!

Jim Grimwood from the Spectrum SPOT project has been bug-fixing a heap of the solutions found at CASA (and The Tipshop). I'm very grateful for this as I'd prefer our solutions to be as correct as possible. There's more to come, but for the time being a huge thank you to Jim for his work.

I know it's not right up our alley here at CASA .... still, it would feel like a missed opportunity not to mention the launch of The Silver Lining. After all sorts of false starts, legal mishaps, renames, more legal challenges and various other bumps in the road, this fan-made King's Quest sequel finally hits the street today. It's been in the works for a good many years, and I'm certain that many users in here have crossed paths with Roberta Williams classic game series at some point in their adventuring career. Give the new game a go - it looks promising.

Things are a tad slow at the moment. Perhaps the summer heat has gotten to CASA's users too. I know, I know, summer is pure evil and we all long for rainy days in front of the computer. It'll happen, people, it'll happen!

We've received a request for help with a true rarity, Forbidden Quest. Anyone feeling adventurous, head over to the forum and see if you can help.

As I'm about to move to a new home, my attendance in here and on the mail will drop for a while. But I'll keep up the best that I can!

In just a few hours I'll be leaving for my annual trip to the Roskilde music festival. But the site remains open for new contributions. Behind the scenes we're working on quite a large games update which will hopefully be ready soon.Today's update is mainly Oric (and therefor French) games.

A number of planned games never made it all the way to our beloved home computers. Whether this was for financial or creative reasons, it's intriguing to think about what could have been. For instance, Infocom's planned sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide, called Milliways, never got very far, but the process behind this makes for an entertaining read.

Now, we're not going to every single title that programmers thought thought about while taking a shower - but some of these unreleased games are just too fascinating to leave out (James Cameron's The Abyss as an adventure game?? Would have loved to see that happening!)We've also started adding games that have been bug-fixed by our users, so that these games can actually be completed.

Quite a lot of material today - not bad, considering the World Cup is on at the moment. I'm usually not really interested in football, but this is too good to pass up on!

The advanced search page has been beefed up even more, so that you can now search for games with various documents or games without solutions - in case you're really bored and wonder what to do next.

The problem mentioned earlier with the screenshots has been... well, "fixed" would be overstating it. It's working now, with the downside that only one screenshot is displayed right now. Hopefully a better solution will turn up.

As you may have noticed, game pages with two or more screenshots take...um.... forever to load. Well, a really long time anyway. I know this site is all about old, slow computers, but I think we all want to be able to read about them in style. And with some measure of speed.But you can sleep safely knowing that the globe's best and brightest are working on it (for the record, I'm not one of them - this is way out of my league).

I'm slowly working my way down the backlog, and today's update includes a bunch of files from Mike Myers (probably not the Shrek actor, but you never know what these Hollywood people are up to!)The staff has been expanded a bit with Dave and Alastair being in charge of the BBC and Dragon sections, respectively. Good work, chaps!Furthermore, the system has been updated to feature a language field, so if you fancy games in something other than English, life should be a bit easier from now on. Some of the games are yet to have their field set correctly.

We're slowly working our way through various bugs and inconsistencies. Thanks also for the many excellent suggestions that I've received during the last days. There's definitely something to work on!Today's update includes a number of Spanish games from Juan.

My promise to include all submitted material with this update turned out to be a bit premature, as there are plenty of bugs and file errors to fix, too. But overall, the updating is progressing at a nice clip. At this point, more than 50 games have been added to the database since last week, and many others have had information added.

After much pondering, debating, coding, debugging, developing, frowning and browser-bashing, the new version of CASA is ready. Well, sort of :)

The project's two programmers, Mr. Creosote and Dave, have been hard at work for the last few months, and we think that the site - warts and all - is in a sufficiently presentable state to launch it now.There are still various matters to take care of, and work on the site will continue during the next period. But so far, here's what's new:

- Separate page for each game, with user ratings, comments and screenshots plus game info- Recommendations system- Easy maintenance and updating (meaning your contributions will be added faster!)- Full crediting for contributions- Advaced search feature- and more

Right now, the framework is in place, it just needs to be filled out. So please,- log in with your forum name and password, or go ahead and register -then set up your profile (upper right corner), rate games, write comments, and help filling out some of the missing game information. This is easily done by clicking the "Send update" link on each game page.Along with Eriorg I've been busy adding info, but there's a great deal missing so I'm counting on you knowledgeable people to assist!

A brief status update:Yes, the site has been awfully quiet lately, but we've been busy behind the scenes.The new site is working as intended on its test server. We're in the process of moving it to my server. In addition, all the existing data - and more - has been put in a database and is ready to be imported. As the new site features better crediting of people submitting files, I've had to set up 120 or so "empty" user accounts for former contributors who aren't currently using the forum.Right now we're working on the visuals and if the import goes as intended, the site should pretty much be ready to go.I hope to go live with the new site within a few weeks. See you soon!

Random Game

The game once again takes place entirely in Balrog's wooden hut at the bottom of his garden, where a swarm of ants have smeared superglue over his toilet seat. Balrog sits down and becomes stuck on the seat, and has only 100 moves to escape from the hut before being attacked by the Rattigator beast.